The goal of this article was to document and explain the gap in educational achievement between Han and minority students in primary schools in western China. In our survey of 300 schools in Shaanxi, Gansu, and Qinghai provinces (involving nearly 21,000 fourth- and fifth-grade students), we find large differences in achievement on standardized exams between Han and minority students. On average, minority students perform 0.25 SD lower in math and 0.22 SD lower in Chinese. Most strikingly, minority students who do not generally speak Mandarin as their primary language score 0.62 SD lower than Han in math and 0.65 SD lower than Han in Chinese.

Using decomposition methods pioneered by Oaxaca (1973) and Blinder (1973), we find that most of the achievement gap between Han and minority students with no alternative ethnic language can be explained by differences in endowments of student, family, and school characteristics. Of these, differences in students and family characteristics appear to contribute the most to differences in achievement. Little of the gap between Han students and non-Mandarin minority students (Salar and Tibetan in our sample), however, can be explained by endowment differences. Comparing these students only to Han students in the same schools significantly reduces the size of the achievement gap, yet a difference of more than 0.2 SD persists. None of this remaining gap is explained by differences in endowments. Although several explanations are possible, we believe that a likely explanation is that the ability of students to learn may be hindered by difficulty comprehending instruction in Mandarin (given that no schools in our sample provided instruction or texts in minority languages). While we cannot say with certainty why these students may benefit less from a given amount of schooling inputs, our analysis suggests that teachers play a significant role.

Background. Despite growing wealth and a strengthening commitment from the government to provide quality education, a significant share of students across rural China still have inadequate access to micronutrient-rich regular diets. Such poor diets can lead to nutritional problems, such as iron-deficiency anemia, that can adversely affect attention and learning in school. Large scale policies in Northwestern China have attempted to tackle these nutritional problems using eggs.  The overall goal of this paper is to assess the impact of the government’s egg distribution program by comparing the effect on anemia rates of an intervention that gives students an egg per day versus an intervention that gives students a chewable vitamin per day. We will also assess whether either intervention leads to improved educational performance among students in poor areas of rural China. To meet this goal, we report on the results of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving over 2,600 fourth grade students from 70 randomly-chosen elementary schools in 5 of the poorest counties in Gansu Province in China’s poor Northwest region. The design called for random assignment of schools to one of two intervention groups, or a control group with no intervention. One intervention provided a daily chewable vitamin, including 5 milligrams of iron. The other mimicked the government policy by providing a daily egg. According to the findings of the paper, in the schools that received the chewable vitamins, hemoglobin (Hb) levels rose by more than 2 g/L (over 0.2 standard deviations). The standardized math test scores of students in these schools also improved significantly. In schools that received eggs, there was no significant effect on Hb levels or math test scores. Overall, these results should encourage China’s Ministry of Education (MOE) to look beyond eggs when tackling nutritional problems related to anemia in an education setting.

Officials in China claim that voting rates in rural village elections are high. Unfortunately, these rates are assumptions, not facts. The true voting rate is lower, and much lower for women. We postulate that this could be due to insufficient knowledge about their rights.

The objective of this paper is to test whether women and village leaders’ knowledge about women’s voting rights affects women’s voting behavior. We report on the results of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving 700 women in China’s Fujian and Liaoning Provinces. Villages were randomly assigned to either a control group or one of three intervention groups. One intervention provided voting training to women only, another provided training to both women and village leaders and the third provided training to village leaders only.

The data show that after women received training, their scores on a test of voting knowledge increased and they more fully exercised their voting rights. When only village leaders were trained, test scores and voting behaviors were not statistically different from the control villages.

In this paper we report the results of a randomized controlled trial designed to measure the impact of a parental training program on the nutritional status of primary school students in rural Shaanxi Province, in Northwest China. Using hemoglobin (Hb) levels as the outcome variable, we first measure the overall impact of a nutritional training program, then measure the impact separately by gender. We use both descriptive and multivariate analyses.

The results for the descriptive and econometric results were robust and consistent with the literature. Overall, we find no impact on students’ Hb levels when we trained their parents about undernutrition and anemia. In both the descriptive and multivariate results, there was no difference in the change of Hb levels between control and treatment students. Parents in the treatment group did learn more about anemia than parents in the control group, but this increased knowledge did not lead to sharp changes in behavior, in general. We did find, however, that there was a measurable impact of parental training on the Hb levels of female students. In both the descriptive and econometric results we found that the Hb levels of female students rose more than that of male students, and that this difference was statistically significant. We conjecture that the parents of female students may have recognized from the training that they were not providing their daughters with sufficient nutrition. Our data show that parents in the treatment group responded by increasing the daily provision of meat, fish, eggs and beans, relative to parents of girls in the control group.

Recent anecdotal reports suggest that dropout rates may be higher and actually increasing over time in poor rural areas. There are many reasons not to be surprised that there is a dropout problem, given the fact that China has a high level of poverty among the rural population, a highly competitive education system and rapidly increasing wages for unskilled workers. The overall goal of this study is to examine if there is a dropout problem in rural China and to explore the effectiveness that a Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program could have on dropouts (and mechanism by which the CCT might affect drop outs). To meet this objective, we conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a CCT using a sample of 300 junior high school students in a nationally-designated poor county in Northwest China. Using our data, we found that the annual dropout rate in the study county was high, about 7%. We find, however, that a CCT program reduces drop outs by 60%; the dropout rate is 13.3%  in the control group and 5.3 % in the treatment group. The program is most effective in the case of girls, younger students and the poorest performing students. 

China's central government incrementally introduced various kinds of student financial aid since the late 1990s in response to public concerns about the rising burden of college prices. Despite the marked increase in financial assistance from governmental as well as non-governmental sources in recent years especially, little is known about how well aid is currently distributed across Chinese universities and whether it is successfully reaching needy students.

We use a unique randomly-sampled dataset of all local senior college students in one northwest province and a combination of non-parametric, semi-parametric and fixed effects methods to examine how various types of financial aid are currently distributed to students of different backgrounds across the university system. We also evaluate whether aid is reaching the main target population of low-income students. We primarily find that government-financed aid is allocated evenly across universities of varying selectivity and is reaching its target population of low-income students within universities. By contrast, university- and society-financed aid is not reaching low-income students. In addition, students in the most selective universities receive large implicit subsidies as they have high instructional costs, get more aid, and pay low tuition fees. Finally, a significant proportion of disadvantaged students do not seem to receive any type of aid.

Despite both requirements of and support for universal education up to grade 9, there are concerning reports that China is still suffering from high and maybe even rising dropout rates in some poor rural areas. Unfortunately, besides aggregated statistics from the Ministry of Education (which show almost universal compliance with the nine year compulsory education law), there is little independent, survey-based evidence on the nature of dropout in China. Between 2009 and 2010 we surveyed over 7,800 grade 7, 8, and 9 students from 46 randomly selected junior high schools in four counties in two provinces in North and Northwest China to measure the dropout rate. We also used the survey data to examine the factors that are correlated with dropping out, such as the opportunity cost of going to school, household poverty, and poor academic performance. According to the study’s findings, dropout rates between grade 7 and grade 8 reached 5.7 percent; dropout rates between grade 8 and grade 9 reached 9.0 percent. This means of the total number of students that matriculated into junior high school (those who were attending school during the first month of the first term of grade 7), 14.2 percent had left school by the first month of grade 9. Dropout rates were even higher for students that were older, from poorer families (and families in which the parents were not healthy), or were performing more poorly academically. We conclude that although the government’s policy of reducing tuition and fees for junior high students may be necessary, it is not sufficient to solve the dropout problem.